Art musings

I'm drawing again, just on a whim, and suddenly I've remembered why art was my favourite class after english in school. Not because I was any good at it (I'm not), but because there is something so very relaxing about watching your hands shape a face on paper. Digging your thumb into the page, drawing shade out to build it up, make it real, finding the logic of line and shade and shape that everything has ... I look at pictures, sometimes, photos of faces, and find myself tracing the shape of them with my thumb over my own features. There's a kind of tactile intimacy about drawing a face, touching without touching, understanding without knowing, tracing lines with your fingers from a distance ... there's just an intimacy and a warmth and a roundness to the experience that's so beautiful and soothing. Even if you hate the person in real life, when you're drawing, just for a minute, it doesn't matter because all you can think is that the lines of this face, the texture of it, is so very beautiful.

It's ... a stranger intimacy again when you're not drawing from life, or even a photo, but from a picture in your head. Then you have to build that internal logic of line and light, find a face beneath your fingers that you've never seen, shape someone from the soul up.

Drawing ... I'd forgotten the fundamental satisfaction and honour and fun of it.

Art

Result of yesterday's foray into sketching. I call him Philoctetes, or Phil for short, after the satyr in Hercules. He looks like a cheerful lecher to me ;) Mostly, I'm just proud of the shading. It's been literally years since I've tried anything at that level of detail.

I've stored the image, once more, on my sister's DA page, because mine just will not stay cooperative. Here:
http://hanapu-lord-of-death.deviantart.com/art/Philoctetes-117713576